Vanishing Points: Thoughts on the Horizontality of Israeli Urbanism

Abstract

When dwelling on horizontality as a viewpoint by which we look at contemporary cities, we may think in very literal terms. We may imagine a homogeneously distributed, spread out, low rise city without borders, crawling across the territory and seeking benign grounds for it to prosper and multiply, fed by market forces. Alternatively, horizontality serves as a relative term characterizing the ratio between the planes of a 3-dimensional space whereby the x-y plane prevails. From this perspective, the horizontal characteristics of the contemporary urban condition become apparent only when zooming out and looking across the terrain at an ever-expanding built environment. This broader approach allows for a complex definition of horizontality, whereby new urban layers are grafted upon previous layers, 21st century configurations of the territory are added upon postmodern, modernist, 19th century, renaissance and medieval urban tissues, and interact with one another not unlike the accumulation and shifting of tectonic plates. This challenges us to develop descriptions and models that are less literally describing the contemporary urban realm as homogeneous, low-rise and spread out, but rather dissecting built up areas and studying the different horizontal layers that interact with one another, either by mutual adaptation or rather the opposite, in a constant state of resistance.